A few days before Christmas, I went out bush in search of likely coin/relic hunting areas near Bendigo, of which there are plenty, but most I’ve found had seen a detector or two over the years, and most of the easy targets had gone long ago.

I managed to locate a small settlement site, with the remains of several stone houses in a row which I guess date around 1850’s or 1860’s. The easily accessible location of this site discouraged me a little, as I was sure someone would have detected it before me. The first house site I decided to detect around immediately excited me, as I was finding many easy objects all around it, which would suggest I was the first there.

Within perhaps half an hour I had a strong 12:28 signal on the Minelab CTX 3030 metal detector which I proceeded to dig without caution, with a gold sovereign the last thing on my mind at the time. Hastily, I scraped the shallow target out and saw the glint of gold sitting on top of the dirt.

After picking it up, I knew what it was which obviously excited me greatly until I realised that I had lightly scraped its face with my digging tool. A beautiful 1830 English full Gold Sovereign.

I moved onto the other house sites in the settlement and began to notice many dig holes by other detectorists, even a pile of dug up junk targets placed on the rocks. I thoroughly detected them and yielded virtually no targets.

I still can’t understand why the first site I decided to detect had not been touched, and the others immediately adjacent had been completely hunted out. Perhaps if I began detecting the others first, the discouragement of them may have sent me away early and not bother continuing on. I can picture this happening to me, and can only suspect this was the case for others.

I have since changed my recovery technique!